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Librarians To Sue Over Mandatory Censoring
JasonMaggini writes: "ZDNet reports the American Library Association is
planning to sue over the new federal law that is putting Web filters on public school and library computers. Great article title, too: 'Filter THIS!'"
Because they want to protect freedom of speech. They didn't become librarians because they wanted to hit people with rulers. Librarians probably mostly love knowledge and freedom of thought. Not because they wanted to sit behind desks and peer over their half-rims.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
If filtering actually worked, I wouldn't mind it. If filtering banned what a majority of people called smut. But allowed anything that was gray to go through, then I wouldn't mind it so much.
Stuff which is obviously smut with no value. (pictures, stories, etc) doesn't have a place in libraries.. But, say, an educational site on masturbation (with pictures) is not something I'd call smut and should be allowed to go through. Now, some people feel that anything touching on sex should be blocked, and they would use filtering as an excuse for these excessive blocks.
The problem is that the filtering is ineffective. Automatic filtering cannot and does not make the above distinction. Human-based filtering suffers from a lack of manpower (of about 5 orders of magnitude). Thus, there is no way to do the ideal. There's no way to even approach the ideal.
As peacefire showed, a noticable fraction of the yahoo porn listings were let through by these 'filters'. Similarily, every few seconds, a child is blocked from a legitimate site.
So, in independent tests, filtering let's half of the outright porn through, and bans a lot of legitimate material.. To me, this is like indiscriminate shooting. Let's go into a bad neighborhood and shoot people at random. We might hit some guilty people by chance, but we'll hurt a lot of innocents.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
If an only if you can show me filtering that does it's job, will I ever accept it. Blocking 90% of the million porn sites leaves 100,000 left; why bother? Using filtering as a way to censor knowledge from your children is bad. (Masturbation, alternate religions) And no filtering program must be allowed to block any educational site, whether that site deals with sexuality, learning about hate-groups, military strategy, guns. For the gains, 100,000 porn sites instead of a whole million, the cost is too much.
Since such a program cannot and does not exist, the most the libraries can do is to put the responsibility on the parent. No one under 18 is allowed internet access. A parent can permit access by their children and can choose among the options:
1. No access allowed.
2. Access allowed only if with an adult. Parent can later review visited websites.
3. Access allowed, parent has the ability to review visited websites. (With an optional time-limit for number of hours)
4. Access allowed, parent does not have the ability to review visited websites. (with an optional time-limit for number of hours)
All access is full access. If a child is with a parent, they get access through their parent's card. No one is allowed to sit in front of the computers without a card. (So a stranger cannot offer a a child access unsupervised.) The parent gets the flexibility for what level of monitoring, if any, their children get. It's also open; the child knows whether or not what they visit will be reviewed by their parents.
Heh.. With some GUI-ified TCL scripts and a squid proxy, this kind of system would be pretty trivial to set up.